African Origins Project

In January 2009 the directors of the project to create Voyages:
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database began the African Origins
Project, a scholar-public collaborative endeavor to trace the
geographic origins of Africans transported in the transatlantic
slave trade. African Origins seeks the help of members of
the African diaspora, Africans, scholars, and others to identify
the likely origins of these liberated Africans and thus begin to
trace the migration histories of other Africans transported across
the Atlantic during the 19th century suppression of the
slave trade. Those with knowledge of African languages, cultural
naming practices, and ethnic groups will assist in identifying
these Africans’ origins by drawing on their own expertise to
identify the likely ethno-linguistic origin of an individual’s
name.

The African Origins Project arose directly from the work of
G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis, who in 2002 used audio recordings
of names found in Courts of Mixed Commission records for Havana,
Cuba, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, to identify likely
ethno-linguistic origins. The names in these recordings were
pronounced by speakers of the same language and accent that the
Courts of Mixed Commission registrars would likely have had (e.g.,
if the name was written in a Havana register, Eltis and Nwokeji had
the name pronounced by a Spanish speaker with a Havana accent).
This helped connect the sound of the name to its spelling and thus
enabled a more accurate assessment of the name’s possible ethnic
origins than provided by its written counterpart alone.

Eltis and Nwokeji played these recordings to informants in
Nigeria and to members of the African
diaspora in parts of North America, who were able to identify
through these pronunciations the likely ethnic group from which the
name derived. Such one-on-one research with informants, though
successful, proved highly time consuming and yielded little more
than two identifications for each African in their dataset, and led
to the pursuit of an online method of broadly soliciting volunteers
to assist with this project.

View digitized images of the first pages of the
Sierra
Leone and Cuba Courts of Mixed Commission registers, from which the
information on these Africans was drawn. An earlier database drawn
from these sources called the African names database is available
on the downloads page of this site. It contains data on stature
that are not available on African-Origins. Information on liberated
Africans and registers of the Courts of Mixed Commission may also
be found in the Glossary. For more information about the African
Origins Project and opportunities to participate, please visit
http://www.african-origins.org.